When medical schools sell out...

Johns Hopkins is now a propaganda arm of the federal government.

"Why would I say that?", you may ask. As someone who took a course on contact tracing from them early during the COVID-19 outbreak (it was somewhat of a reconnaissance mission, and it was a traumatic experience, at least for logic, truth, and our constitutionality-protected rights), I recently received an email for a new course offering: "COVID Vaccine Ambassador Training: How to Talk to Parents." Out of sheer, morbid curiosity, I had to see what they were teaching to help people move parents from "vaccine hesitancy" to getting their kids jabbed. What I found would make Joseph Goebbels proud. In the interest of “brevity” (make no mistake - what you are about to read is not “brief”), I cannot cover every issue I take with this course. If you have two hours to spare, and enjoy a challenge of discernment and identifying logical fallacies, the course is available for free to anyone by signing up on coursera.com .

The crew of the S. S. Minnow could easily get lost in all that is wrong with this 2-hour course. It is riddled with logical fallacies and twisted truths enough to evoke Edward Nigma's envy. In true Reich Minister of Propaganda fashion, the Bloomberg School of Public Medicine sets about instructing the learner how to spot and counter what they deem "misinformation", then follow with manipulative techniques and actual misinformation the learner is expected to use in convincing parents their children should be jabbed.

Let's dig in with some examples. I'll start from the beginning and approach this according to the order the information is addressed in the course.

The course begins by discussing "vaccine hesitancy", what it is, and why people may be "vaccine hesitant." According to the material, “vaccine hesitancy,” as it is to be understood by a “vaccine ambassador” is “when people  delay or refuse getting a vaccine.” In reality, “vaccine hesitancy" is a derogatory phrase coined during the COVID-19 outbreak to describe anyone who doesn't, without hesitation, ingest the establishment Covid "vaccine" narrative.

So, how do we overcome vaccine hesitancy? Why, effective communication, of course. Just as there are three “reasons” for vaccine hesitancy - Confidence (or lack thereof in the vaccines and their safety, in the health system and/or providers, or in policymakers), Complacency (low perceived risk of the disease, or allowing other life issues to take priority), and Convenience (“barriers related to geographic accessibility, availability, affordability, and acceptability of services” - are these really reasons?) - there are three strategies for having effective “vaccine conversations” - manipulate, manipulate, and manipulate. Ok, that’s not exactly how the course lists them. According to the slides, the conversation must be approached properly, using empathy to gain trust by listening to concerns and questions, even if you disagree. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with showing empathy, the way this is proposed is manipulative in that empathy, which should be shown to all without ulterior motives, is being used to gain trust to accomplish a goal. After learning about empathy, the three strategies outlined in the course are sharing your own story, highlighting “social norms,” and “addressing myths and misinformation.”

Let’s start with the first. From the lesson, “people don’t always make decisions based on data.” This is true, people often make decisions based on emotion, and most marketing is geared toward taking advantage of that fact. Relying on this is itself a logical fallacy known as “appeal to emotion.” In this particular case, the learner is encouraged to exploit that by using their own story (i.e. “I made my kid get the jab”) to encourage and convince others to do the same. This is manipulation using another logical fallacy known as “appeal to anecdote.” The argument depends on your personal experience, not whether the shot is actually beneficial.

Next comes “highlighting social norms.” Basically, the ambassador is taught to turn up the peer pressure. The material states, “Social norms are the behaviors considered normal or acceptable in a social group.” In other words, “everyone else is doing it; you’ll feel left out or unaccepted if you don’t.” This is a logical fallacy known as argument ad populum, or appeal to popularity (or perhaps a bandwagon fallacy). It is a manipulation based simply on the sheer number of people who have consented to have their children injected. As with the first, there is no basis in science nor evidence of benefit underlying this argument.

The third and final strategy is addressing “misinformation.” This one is a little more complex and in depth, but it breaks down simply just the same. The problem they see here is that people may believe “myths and misinformation” that they hear from family or see on social media. The approach, however, isn’t to counter the “misinformation”; instead, the student is encouraged to “pivot” the conversation to the “real” risks of the disease itself. This is the logical fallacy known as a “red herring”. Technically, this could also be considered a “slippery slope” fallacy - “if you reject the jab, these will be the consequences…”

Let’s look now, as the course attempts to educate the student, at immunology, the virus, vaccines, more detail about misinformation, and vaccinating children. Here we will find more logical fallacies as well as outright lies.

In a section titled, “Basics of the immune system,” the courseware discusses the difference between natural immunity and vaccination. Also in this section, the material states, “[o]ver time your immune system may not recognize or fight off a pathogen as well, even if you’ve been vaccinated or recovered from an infection.” This is true and it is the reason many vaccines require boosters. The same slide also has the following bullet-point: “However, studies report that immunity from COVID-19 vaccine lasts much longer than immunity after an infection.” This is an outright lie. Study after study is showing that natural immunity is stronger and far more durable than anything afforded by the COVID-19 shots (as is also evidenced by the rapidity with which boosters have been required). This is generally the case with ALL diseases - natural immunity will always surpass the efficacy of man-made immunity. Don’t just take it from me. Since the courseware insists the student should refer people to “trustworthy” sources, let’s go ahead and use some of their own:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting-immunity-found-after-recovery-covid-19

“The data on natural immunity are now overwhelming,” Makary told the Morning Wire. “It turns out the hypothesis that our public health leaders had that vaccinated immunity is better and stronger than natural immunity was wrong. They got it backwards. And now we’ve got data from Israel showing that natural immunity is 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity. And that supports 15 other studies.”

- Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine professor.

While this report from the CDC intentionally avoids stating such outright, the data is enough to conclude that natural immunity far superior to that (if any) induced by the shots:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/vaccine-induced-immunity.html

One of the next lies that the courseware seeks to continue promulgating is that, not only can asymptomatic carriers transmit COVID-19, but “[m]ost transmission of COVID-19 is from people without any symptoms (asymptomatic) and individuals who are contagious but haven’t started to feel sick yet.” This was debunked by science many months ago. Even Anthony Fauci stated in 2020 that asymptomatic carriers have NEVER been drivers in an outbreak of respiratory viruses:

Anthony Fauci: Asymptomatic Transmission NEVER Drives ...

He is not alone in this, and many studies have shown that asymptomatic transmission is likely rare, if it happens at all. Here are just a couple of examples:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32513410/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2774102

Next we move on to “vaccines.” It is interesting that the slides rightly state, “Vaccines contain a dead or weakened version of that specific pathogen, or even just a fragment of a pathogen.” That said, this is not true of the COVID-19 shots. The COVID-19 shots contain mRNA that instructs your cells to manufacture a fragment of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. More interesting is that the CDC used to define vaccines in this way, but they have since changed and simplified their definition in order to squeeze the COVID-19 shots in.

Before:

Vaccines: The Basics

Vaccines contain the same germs that cause disease. (For example, measles vaccine contains measles virus, and Hib vaccine contains Hib bacteria.) But they have been either killed or weakened to the point that they don’t make you sick. Some vaccines contain only a part of the disease germ.

A vaccine stimulates your immune system to produce antibodies, exactly like it would if you were exposed to the disease. After getting vaccinated, you develop immunity to that disease, without having to get the disease first.

This is what makes vaccines such powerful medicine. Unlike most medicines, which treat or cure diseases, vaccines prevent them.

Now:

“Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.”

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/imz-basics.htm

As we continue, the courseware addresses questions people may have regarding vaccines, one asking if vaccines contain toxic ingredients. A slide proclaims, “[e]ven naturally occurring chemicals can sound a little scary.” The student is then asked if you would give the following “chemicals” to a baby: ash, phytosterols, e515, 3-methylbutyl-1-ol, and ethyl butanoate. Finally, the slide exclaims, “[t]hese are some of the components of a banana!” Unfortunately for the author(s), these statements are all victims of the logical fallacy of false equivalence. Just because a compound “sounds scary,” doesn’t mean there is reason to fear it. Likewise, it doesn’t mean it’s safe either. While the compounds that naturally occur in foods are generally safe, many naturally-occurring compounds are toxic (think arsenic, for one), as are many man-made compounds. Just because the 3-methylbutyl-1-ol in bananas is safe, that doesn’t mean the petroleum-based polyethylene glycol 2000 in the COVID-19 shots is safe, especially when the manufacturer states explicitly, “NOT for human or animal use” ( https://moleculardepot.com/product/polyethylene-glycol-2000-peg-2000/ ). Of course, most doctors and pharmacists don’t even have a list of ingredients in the shots, so what other  “toxic chemicals” (like the aluminum in other shots that this slide deck claims is in smaller amounts than one is likely to consume in food) are present is unknown.

In answering the question, “Can your immune system tolerate multiple vaccines at once?”, the next slide claims that “[y]our immune system is fighting germs 24 hours a day every single day!” This is again a fallacy of faulty equivalence. While we may be exposed to germs all day every day, not all of them find their way into our bodies as injected vaccines do. This slide also claims, “[d]elaying vaccinations can cause community outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles or chickenpox.” Here we again see the slippery slope fallacy, as failure to vaccinate does not necessarily imply an outbreak will occur. This also ignores the fact that most recent outbreaks of supposedly “preventable illnesses” have been caused by vaccines or contracted by those vaccinated at higher rates than the unvaccinated. Polio and pertussis provide two examples of this:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6710a4.htm

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2027168/

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/despite-vaccination-nearly-50-harvard-westlake-students-catch-whooping-cough/ (all of the ill students were vaccinated - no unvaccinated students were infected)

With regard to the section on the “Vaccine regulatory process”, there is one item I would like to address of which I was previously unaware. According to the material, part of the reason the pharmaceutical companies were able to deliver so many doses so quickly (aside from the supposed prior research that had been ongoing - failing would be more accurate - for decades prior) was that they built manufacturing facilities while clinical trials were ongoing. This is unusual in that money to build manufacturing facilities, as even stated in the slides, normally isn’t invested until after completion of phase 3 trials. Since phase 3 trials are still technically incomplete, one must wonder the incentive that would provoke the pharmaceutical companies to invest such large amounts prior to knowing whether their products would be approved/authorized for use. I sense a huge conflict of interest here.

As well, this deck states that, “[e]very study and every phase of every trial was carefully reviewed and approved by a safety board and the FDA. The Pfizer vaccine alone had a trial of more than 40,000 people over a period of many months without any serious incidents.” Is death not a serious incident?

“Six people died in Pfizer’s late-stage trial of the COVID-19 vaccine, the US Food and Drug Administration has revealed just hours after Britain became the first country in the world to roll out the vaccine.

But the deaths are said to raise no new safety issues or questions about the vaccine’s effectiveness because all represented events that occurred in the general population at a similar rate, the FDA concluded.” - https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2020/12/09/pfizer-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccines/

In another slide, one can read, “[t]he Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved COVID-19 vaccines after a rigorous review of safety data from over 70,000 clinical trial volunteers.” This statement about the rigorous review, along with the statement from the other slide, contradicts what the FDA themselves state:

Q: What safety and effectiveness data did FDA evaluate to support the authorization for emergency use of administration of a single vaccine booster dose?

A: FDA analyzed safety and immune response data from a subset of participants from the original clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine. The immune responses of approximately 200 participants 18 through 55 years of age who received a single vaccine booster dose approximately 6 months after their second dose were assessed. The antibody response against a Wuhan-like SARS-CoV-2 virus one month after a booster dose of the vaccine compared to the response one month after the two-dose primary series in the same individuals demonstrated a booster response.

Safety was evaluated in 306 participants 18 through 55 years of age and 12 participants 65 years of age and older who were followed for an average of over two months. The most commonly reported side effects by the clinical trial participants who received the booster dose of the vaccine were pain, redness and swelling at the injection site, fatigue, headache, muscle or joint pain, and chills. Of note, swollen lymph nodes in the underarm were observed more frequently following the booster dose than after primary series doses.

https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-frequently-asked-questions#62056bb084132

I’m sorry, but evaluating safety based on only 306 of over 40,000 participants does not qualify as “rigorous” or being “carefully reviewed.” In addition, there was at least one known case of a whistleblower calling attention to the FDA of problems with the trial data at the lab site at which she worked - https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

And lest anyone miss the distinction, contrary to the statement from this slide, the FDA did not “approve” any vaccines at the outset - vaccines only received Emergency Use Authorization (though Pfizer/BioNTech’s as yet unavailable “Comirnaty” has been approved); there is a big distinction. This is a logical fallacy known as equivocation, and it is deceptive.

The next section is titled, “Available COVID-19 vaccines,” and this section contains a statement that must be addressed. “COVID-19 vaccines have not been linked to any long-term health impacts.” Considering the number of stories floating around out there of people who are now permanently disabled after receiving the shot, and the deaths, including so many athletes dropping in the middle of a game, this statement is an outright lie. In fact, the number of adverse events in the VAERS database (the CDC and FDA’s own tracking system for adverse events) for COVID-19 shots is greater than for all other vaccines combined for the past 30 years.

Finally we arrive at the sections on “misinformation.” The first of two sections on misinformation, “Misinformation basics,” defines three types of “misinformation”:

• Misinformation - “[u]nintentionally sharing false or misleading information.”

• Disinformation -  “[d]eliberately and intentionally sharing engineered falsehoods.” It goes on to state, “[d]isinformation is circulated with malicious intent or for the purpose of serving a personal, political, or economic agenda” (we’ll want to keep this one in mind).

• Fake News - “false information dressed up to look like it came from a news outlet like a newspaper, radio station, or TV news.”

Next comes a section on identifying misinformation. In this section, the student learns about techniques used to spread misinformation so that misinformation can be spotted easily. This is part of the “prebunking” (“Preemptively + Debunking”) strategy.

The first technique they claim is used to spread misinformation is “highly emotional language, especially moral language.” As pointed out earlier in this writing, appealing to emotion is the whole strategy used by this course to help move people from “vaccine hesitancy” to vaccine acceptance. Does that mean this whole course is false information? Emotional and moral language has also been the mainstay of the mainstream media since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak (it is not accurate to call it a “pandemic” as it does not meet the historical definition of “pandemic”): fear, distrust of others, moral superiority of those willing to submit to dictates that would supposedly protect others, etc. Perhaps the mainstream media has been spreading misinformation for the past two years?

Another technique listed is using “fake experts.” This entails “[p]resenting an unqualified person or institution as a source of credible information”. This section involves an “appeal to authority” fallacy. They teach that the student should watch for citations from authorities whose credentials might not be in the field related to the information being discussed. The problem here is multifaceted. For one, many well-credentialed authorities are in disagreement regarding the COVID-19 shots. Some of the most notable are actually opposed to them, or at least wary of them. Many of the “authorities,” however, that most people are depending upon, are questionable. Anthony Fauci has a history of poor decisions with regard to approaching diseases and treatments (such as HIV/AIDS), however, he has been heralded as the country’s foremost authority throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. Colin Ferguson of Imperial College was responsible for models upon which many of the interventions for COVID-19 were based. Ferguson has a history of wildly inaccurate modeling with prime examples being H1N1 flu and mad cow disease. In addition to some who may (or may not) be properly credentialed “authorities,” one must also look at what motivations or potential conflicts of interest they may have. Pfizer may have many well-credentialed scientists on staff, but they would be highly motivated to provide data and “opinions” that would benefit their company. The CDC has even forwarded questionable (at best) statements, likely for political reasons. So, the same strategies the course provides for discerning misinformation must be applied as well to the experts the course favors. Based on what has been seen for the last two years from the national health “authorities” and from the mainstream media, we might conclude that referencing them is a faulty appeal to authority.

In order to debunk misinformation, the student is encouraged to “share information and links to credible, evidence-based medical or public health resources.” Again, this is to a degree a faulty appeal to authority. That said, I wrote a paper showing the shots to not be “vaccines” and to not have any scientifically discernible benefit based on Pfizer’s own studies, and which references sources like the CDC, FDA, NIH, WHO, NIAID, etc.

This has been reviewed by doctors, including Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former VP from Pfizer who is also concerned about these shots.

Now we come to the final section, “Vaccinating children and reducing COVID-19 transmission.” Here we find many similar half-truths and logical fallacies as in the rest of the course. 

“Although COVID-19 in children is typically milder than in adults, some kids infected with the coronavirus can get very sick.” This is simply an appeal to emotion and a slippery slope. The VAST majority of children infected with the virus have mild or no symptoms. Most recover quickly. There have been very few children hospitalized for COVID-19, and far fewer have died. Just as many in the population have been led to believe that contracting COVID-19 is unquestionably a death sentence, the reality is that the vast majority of people (especially healthy people under the age of 70) recover fully from COVID-19, whether they are asymptomatic or even exhibit severe effects.

“Children can also transmit the coronavirus to others if they’re infected, even when they have no symptoms. This can put grandparents at risk.” This is yet another faulty appeal to emotion. While it is possible for children to spread the disease, studies have shown there is very little likelihood of children contributing in a significant way to transmission. This is why some countries (like Sweden) never shut down schools or even required masking. That doesn’t stop the courseware from warning that your child might kill grandma!

 “Vaccines for children ages 5-11 years old were approved by the FDA on Nov. 2, 2021.” Here again we find the fallacy of equivocation. No existent COVID-19 shots have been “approved” for anyone, including children ages 5-11. Perhaps more interesting is that only the Pfizer/BioNTech shot has been authorized for use in anyone under the age of 18. Is there a conflict of interest that should be revealed?

“Having your teen or child vaccinated as soon as they are eligible will help prevent infections and spread of COVID-19.” This one is just outright wrong. All of the evidence available today is showing the shots have little benefit (if not negative efficacy) in stopping infection, and they definitely have little to no effect on transmission. 

There is so much more in this course that could be picked apart, but what I have written here is more than enough to show that the “Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Medicine” could just as well be called the “Johns Hopkins Goebbels Ministry of Public Health Propaganda.”